Genealogies of reflexivity: register formations and the making of affective workers

How has the ability to express reflexivity, including regulating affect, come to be part of the bundled self that workers are required to be? This paper offers a rigorous genealogical analysis of the multiple histories of knowledge and power that have informed the emergence and shaping of ‘reflexive registers,’ or socially typified ways of speaking and reflecting about oneself that stand for morally marked models of selfhood. It takes as a starting-point programs documented in my ethnography of employability programs in London, UK where workers of all sorts are asked to learn to examine their personalities and to express their feelings. It then draws on original historiographical and ethnographic data that allows documentation of the logics and circumstances informing the emergence and development of reflexivity as a resource for employability. It argues for an interdisciplinary understanding of reflexivity and its communicability that theorises the workers as products of history, capital, and affect

Engineering commodifiable workers: language, migration and the governmentality of the self

This article examines the strategies and forms of expertise on language and communication mobilized to engineer commodifiable migrant workers. Drawing on an ethnographic account of counselling practices in a state-run Italian job guidance centre for newly arrived migrants, I examine the calculations, tactics, and forms of expertise on language and communication mobilised by job counsellors. Here, I illustrate how these tactics regulate, or “police”, migrants’ communicational conduct and promote their socialisation into a desirable professional self that can be commodified on the Italian job market. In doing so, I demonstrate that the state’s investment in the policing of migrants and the commodifiability of their labour is an investment in a larger project of societal consent for both the arriving migrants and for the forms of precarity they are believed to embody in Italy. At the same time, I argue this state agenda should not make us blind to the fact that the individuals and actors, including professional counsellors, working in these job guidance centres seem ready to invest a great deal into these spaces in the interest of pursuing another, more emancipated agenda. Indeed, in my paper I aim to demonstrate that job guidance centres are also spaces of hope where people work to support migrants who are preparing themselves for a viable future and attempting to create the practical framework for their life projects

Speeding up, slowing down. Language, temporality and the constitution of migrant workers as labour force

This article offers an original ethnographic documentation of employability schemes targeting migrants in contemporary Italy. It argues that analysts’ current theorisations of time and space compression do not help us understand the multiple temporalities that migrants are subjected to when crossing borders, including those of labour market regimes. This ethnographic account is informed by a scholarship of migration that has extensively documented how the acceleration of movement and access to language, citizenship or work co-exist with experiences of waiting, elongation, withdrawal and delay – processes that complicate our understanding of the temporal regimes migrants are subjected to. Through a thick documentation of the experiences of unemployed migrants, job counsellors and other social actors in employability programmes in Rome, this article argues that both speeding up and slowing down are technologies of temporal management, including time–space compression, elongation and partitioning. These technologies regulate the time and speed of migrants’ incorporation into the labour market and allow the performance of processes of differential inclusion

Cesare Pavese, Trabajar cansa. Vendrá la muerte y tendrá tus ojos (2018), Traducción de Jorge Aulicino. Buenos Aires: Griselda García Editora. ISBN 978-987-42-6654-5, 200 pp.

Vivimos en una sociedad de signos. Una suerte de "inflacion del significante" atraviesa nuestra cultura. En ese contexto, es bueno recordar que alguna vez la humanidad vivio en una sociedad de simbolos, en donde la palabra se vuelve tension entre lo cosmico y lo onirico, entre los hombres y lo sagrado, entre la historia y el mito. Es la poesia la manifestacion mas acabada de esta sociedad de simbolos que, pese a todo, subsiste en los subsuelos de aquella otra aparentemente dominante, con una vida casi silenciosa pero vital y explicita. No por nada, la filosofia y la poesia, al decir de ese gran poeta y pensador que fue Giacomo Leopardi, son las disciplinas mas afines entre si. Por tanto, no es solo bueno sino tambien necesario celebrar la edicion en espanol de la poesia de ese inmenso autor de la Italia de la primera mitad del siglo XX que fue Cesare Pavese (Cuneo, 9 de septiembre de 1908- Turin, 27 de agosto de 1950), en una excelente traduccion del poeta argentino Jorge Aulicino. Trabajar cansa ( Lavorare stanca, 1936/1943) y Vendra la muerte y tendra tus ojos ( Verra la morte e avra i tuoi occhi, 1951) constituyen los ejes poeticos de una obra mucho mas extensa, marcada por la narrativa

Introducción a la Sección Reseña y Rescate de Libros

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